Top 30 U.S. Cities to Start a Web Development Career

By Thinkful

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the Web Development industry will grow 27% by 2024. In our daily lives, we all see and feel that growth happening, with new apps and online services popping up every day. It’s easy to assume that all of that growth is being powered from Silicon Valley, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

We can see exactly where web development is growing on a more granular level by analyzing thousands of individual job posts around the country. As a software school, we frequently talk to students who are curious about which cities are the best to start a web development career in. To help emphasize how much tech opportunity there is all around the United States, we put together this brief report.

The data consists of Indeed’s job listings within 25 miles of each of each listed major city, filtered by jobs listing “JavaScript” as a requisite skill. Thinkful’s Career Prep team has consistently used this as a reliable primary filter to detect web development jobs while also excluding low-level work sprucing up web pages.

Here are the Top 30 Cities to Start a Web Development Career — we were surprised by #1:

Rank

City, State

Job Listings

1

Washington, D.C.

824

2

New York, NY

751

3

San Francisco, CA

587

4

Seattle, WA

450

5

Los Angeles, CA

313

6

Chicago, IL

306

7

Baltimore, MD

253

8

Atlanta, GA

234

9

Dallas, TX

234

10

Austin, TX

211

11

Philadelphia, PA

176

12

San Diego, CA

164

13

Denver, CO

163

14

Orange County, CA

142

15

Phoenix, AZ

133

16

Minneapolis, MN

123

17

Raleigh-Durham, NC

119

18

Portland, OR

95

19

Kansas City, MO

88

20

Detroit, MI

87

21

Columbus, OH

86

22

Houston, TX

81

23

Salt Lake City, UT

80

24

Orlando, FL

79

25

Pittsburgh, PA

79

26

Tampa, FL

78

27

Indianapolis, IN

67

28

Charlotte, NC

65

29

Milwaukee, WI

53

30

St Louis, MO

51

As you can see, you definitely don’t need to be in Silicon Valley to get a job in tech. In fact, the vast majority of America’s jobs in web development are spread across the map, outside the traditional tech hubs. Even when we exclude the top 3 of Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco, there have been over 4,000 job postings looking for web developers in the last 30 days. Every company is rapidly becoming a tech company, so there’s a big demand for the skills needed to make that happen.